5 Ways to Permanently Remove Photos and Other Data from SD Card

SD (Secure Digital) Cards are very common these days to boost memory on a device like Smartphone, Digital Camera etc. It comes in mini and micro formats. When these cards are attached with smart devices like Android phones, you get many options to erase and format the cards, but when devices such as IP camera and other devices use this card, formatting may not come that much handy. We keep pushing more and more data in these cards but after certain period of time, we need to clean the card either to make space for more files or for privacy reasons. In this article, you will learn about erasing the data including files, photos, videos etc. permanently from the SD cards.

Unlike traditional hard disks, these SD cards and SSD are very much secure and formatting these cards not just remove the indexing but the real data itself. Whether you are using these cards on your DSLR, Android phone, Tablet, IP cameras, Attendance Bio-metric device or any other device, these simple techniques will make your clean the cards by erasing data permanently.

Use Default Formatting Option – Android phones come with a setting option to format the SD cards. Even cameras also come with an option to format the installed SD card. As I told earlier, once you format SD cards using the default option, there is no way to recover the old data from the formatted card.In Android phone, go to Settings ==> Storage option ==> Unmount SD card ==> Select ‘Format SD card’ option.

Corrupt SD Cards – If the SD card is corrupt and is not readable on your phone or device, that’s a problem because you can’t use the default formatting option. There is a tool to format such SD cards by connecting it to your computer using a SD card adopter. This tool formats SD/SDHC/SDXC standard cards. Application is available for Windows and Mac operating systems.

Android Apps – Android users can utilize apps such as SD maid, CCleaner, Clean Master to cleanup the SD card. Even if you are using the card only with camera device, attach the SD card for time being on Android phone, open the app and get the card cleaned up. These apps clean everything from the card and make it ready to use again.

BitLocker Encryption and Format – Windows users can connect the SD card to computer using adapter and then open BitLocker Drive Encryption. Enable BitLocker for your SD card. Now use Standard Formatting option to format the card (option is available on Disk Management panel). Do not use Quick Format. Once the formatting is done, encrypt it again using the BitLocker panel. No one can recover anything ever from the SD card now.

#BitLocker technique works for regular Hard Disk and SSD as well.

Do you use any other technique to permanently erase data from your SD, Mini SD and Micro SD cards. If so, please share your thoughts via comment and share the article to make other aware about how to erase data from these small but powerful cards.